Leviathan 4: Cities

Following up on the World Fantasy Award-winning Leviathan 3, Leviathan 4 is a Baedeker of the fantastical, exploring the character of cities and the city as character, mapping the streets of the imagination. This fourth volume of the Leviathan series takes the reader to a variety of cities in all their splendor and decadence. Explore the streets of the imagination, wander the byways, and hear the stories of these fantastical foci with such authors as Philip K. Dick Award winner Stepan Chapman, International Horror Guild Award Winner Michael Cisco, and "The Etched City" author KJ Bishop.Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

From Publishers Weekly

Aguirre's relatively restrained fourth volume in his World Fantasy Award–winning series showcases 10 literate dark fantasy stories, which may be variously described as surreal, decadent, absurd or horrific. In perhaps the finest tale, Jay Lake's "The Soul Bottles," a wealthy man is ruined after his trade in soul bottles, which literally hold the souls of the dead, is proclaimed heretical. His son then goes through a Dickens-like fall into working-class obscurity before achieving financial success, albeit sacrificing much of his humanity along the way. Also memorable are Stepan Chapman's surreal "The Revenge of the Calico Cat," a wonderfully detailed piece set in the city where toys go after they die, and Ben Peek's "The Dreaming City," in which Mark Twain dreams of an encounter with Cadi, the aboriginal spirit of Australia's Sydney Harbour, and is moved to write a book in defense of that continent's native population. Other notable contributors include Michael Cisco, K.J. Bishop and Ursula Pflug. Although not up to the level of Leviathan 3 (2002), this solid anthology should appeal to readers of Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville and other modern masters of the fantastic. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Dana Gioia notes in an essay in Disappearing Ink (reviewed on p.377) that literary surrealism has been a slow sell in a country that has imbibed Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, and their descendants longer than Europe has read Kafka. But here, America, is literary surrealism at its most thoroughgoing, though with a populist tinge that makes it very likable. These are elaborately, illogically, episodically, achronologically dreamlike stories. They don't end tidily or even definitely. The characters don't necessarily know the settings better than readers might. The "stuffies" (stuffed toys) in Stepan Chapman's "The Revenge of the Calico Cat" haven't a clue that they live in Raggedy Ann and Andy land. In Ben Peek's "The Dreaming City," Mark Twain and Pemulwy know they're in Sydney, Australia, but their realities overlap from opposite ends of the nineteenth century; moreover, Twain is dreaming, whereas Pemulwy dreams of freedom from the English. K. J. Bishop's, Ursula Pflug's, and Alan Kausch's contributions arguably dazzle even more than Chapman's and Peek's, and there are five more stories here. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer is an American writer, editor and publisher. He is best known for his contributions to the New Weird and his stories about the city of Ambergris, in books like City of Saints and Madmen.

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